Kimberly Derting: The Taking

I’d only made it one step before the man had ahold of my arms and was dragging me back out the door. I heard his phone fall, clattering on the tile floor. He wasn’t gentle, and my heart was racing, slamming against my ribs, bruising them. I didn’t know what he planned to do to me. The little boy was crying, but the man didn’t release me as he hauled me down the steps. I tripped over my own feet as he pulled me along the walkway until we were standing on the sidewalk out in front.

“I don’t know what you’re problem is,” he hissed, trying to keep his voice low, his eyes shifting back and forth from me to the screaming boy with no pants at the front door. “But this is my house, and you’re scaring my son. If you need help, then call 9-1-1. I can’t do anything for you.” He released my arm but didn’t leave right away. He just stood there looking at me, waiting for some sort of acknowledgment that I’d heard what he’d said.

I had. I’d heard him. I just couldn’t make sense of it.

His house?

Is that what he’d said? His house?

But that wasn’t right. This was my house.

My house.

I tried to find something in all of it to cling to, something that would clear things up. I replayed the last few minutes, when I’d burst through the front door, and tried to recall what I’d seen.

It was the same house I remembered. The same, but different.

How could that be?

Tears burned my eyes as I looked, too, not at the boy, but at the house in front of us. The house I’d grown up in.

The man gave me one last piteous look before shaking his head and going back to his son. The boy raised his arms to his father, who scooped him up and carried him back inside, closing the door without looking back at me.

I wanted to explain what I was going through, to tell him who I was and who my parents were, but all I could manage was “But I . . . I live here.”

The house across the street was almost as familiar to me as my own, which right now wasn’t entirely reassuring. The pounding in my head was back, starting behind my eyes and radiating down the back of my neck. FML.

Despite the past few minutes, I wasn’t hesitant as I neared the perfectly edged grass and tidy flower beds, because it was all so familiar. All so comforting.

Everything was exactly as it should be.

Even the car in the driveway—Austin’s mother’s—the same as always.

Austin would know what was happening. He’d clear things up for me.

I checked my phone again and saw the same NO SERVICE message blinking at me from the screen. If Austin’s car had been there, I would have gone to his window. Instead, I went around back to the kitchen door and rapped softly.

When Austin materialized on the other side, peering at me through the panes of glass that separated us, I leaned forward, sagging against the door as relief loosened the knots in my chest and the tension in the back of my neck. I pressed my hand against the window, the same way the little boy had in my house when he’d waved to me through my living-room window.

Austin was here!

Everything would be fine now. Austin would make everything okay.

The door opened, and I moved with it, tumbling inside as I fell into him. His arms opened, catching me before I could fall all the way to the floor.

“Thank god,” I mumbled against his chest, the only place that felt safe. I no longer cared that I was still wearing my uniform, dirt and sweat stains making it rank. “Thank god you’re here. I’ve had the strangest morning. The strangest night. I have no idea what’s going on.”

The arms around me tightened, but only slightly, and then I heard his mother’s voice, so achingly well-known to me that tears brimmed in my eyes. “Tyler? Who is it? What’s going on?”

I hadn’t noticed Tyler, Austin’s kid brother, but it was a relief to know I was no longer alone, that I was surrounded by familiar faces when everything else was so out of whack.

I drew back from Austin so I could see his mom. “It’s just me,” I told her. “I just came over because—” I wasn’t sure how I’d planned on finishing my explanation, but I never had the chance.

Tamara Wahl dropped her coffee mug. The ceramic shards became projectiles as it shattered, sending pieces flying in every direction. Coffee pooled at her feet, but she just stood there, staring at me, her mouth gaping.

“Mom, it’s Kyra . . . ,” Austin said, and for the first time I realized that this was all wrong too. I looked down at the arms, still at my waist, and noticed the wiry hairs on them. They should have been flaxen, closer to blond than brown. Even the arms, the skin, seemed somewhat too pale, as if this version of Austin hadn’t just finished his annual lifeguard certification—something my Austin had most definitely done.

His voice, too, was not right. It was deep, yes, the timbre just shades away from Austin’s.

I was almost afraid to look at his face.

And that was when he caught me for the second time. The moment I realized that he wasn’t Austin at all; he never had been.

This was Tyler Wahl. Tyler, who looked far too much like his older brother—my seventeen-year-old boyfriend—in looks, in stature . . . and, most of all, in age.

Tyler, who, the last time I’d seen him just the day before , had been only twelve years old.

“KYRA, ARE YOU SURE I CAN’T GET YOU SOMEthing?” Tamara Wahl asked, her disembodied head looming out of the darkness as she peered into the bedroom.

I wasn’t sure how I’d gotten here, but at least I knew where I was. Or thought I did. Everything felt topsy-turvy at the moment.

“No. I don’t think so.” I shifted on the Batman sheets that I’d laid on almost as many times as my own. “No. I’m okay.”

I glanced around at a room I had memorized. I knew right where the poster of Mark Spitz (the Olympic swimmer Austin idolized) was—the one with the preprinted autograph Austin had tried to replicate above it when he was eleven in scribbly purple marker. The furniture was arranged exactly the same as always: his bed, his dresser, his corner desk plastered with a mishmash collection of sports and music and bumper stickers he’d collected.

But despite the sameness of it, it was missing his everyday clutter. His overflowing clothes hamper, the discarded Coke cans and water glasses on top of his dresser, messy homework piles on his desk. Even the bed was too neat, the sheets too fresh and smooth, as if they’d just been changed.

As if I were inside a diorama of Austin’s room. A perfect, unused replica.

His mother had tried to explain things to me, but nothing she’d said made any sense. It was like she’d been speaking gibberish.

Five years, she’d kept saying. It had been five years since anyone had seen me last.

She was wrong, of course.

Wrong.

Wrong.

Wrong.

It hadn’t been five years. It had been one night. I knew because I had been at my softball game. The championship game.

I knew because I was still wearing my uniform, and it still smelled like grass and sweat, and I still had the ribbons threaded through my hair.

One night, I kept insisting while my head and my throat ached. My dad and I had had an argument, and I’d run off to have a few minutes to myself—that was all. I must’ve wandered until I’d fallen asleep. At the Gas ’n’ Sip. Behind the Dumpster.

One damn night. Not five long years.

But she’d given me some time alone to absorb it, to let it sink in before coming back to check on me.

She patted my hand now, her voice cautious, as if I were held together by wishes and hopes. “Well, your mom should be here soon. Maybe she’ll do a better job of explaining things than I did.”